Writer's Block?

 Red shadows bleed across the graying mountains that thumb themselves in a

knotted garland across the ancient horizon. Sky gods sacrificed their golden orb of glory, throwing it downward to appease the hunger of the pewter sea. The sun erupts from hidden chambers beneath the waves in an effervescent glow of light and turns the world upside down where sea becomes sky and I its cloud. I sit at twilight on the weeping grass framing this picturesque lake, harbinger of the sun’s dying breath. A cob-webbed lamp-post towers over me, sweating liquid light onto my page as I try once more at blotting my thoughts onto the paper’s fragile surface. My pen seems always to reject the weight of words crashing through my brain, and my page holds the reflective prowess of a moss-encrusted pond in translating my thoughts. However, both pen and paper are akin in their frustrating ambivalence concerning my assiduous rage at their communicative incompetence.

The Bar Tender . . . (I'm a waitress on the side)

A rough guffaw thunders in his throat from behind the bar where he is fixated

like the booze that lines the wall. Translucent bottles glare at him with the dim reflections of fluorescent lighting and the flicker of oil-burning candles floating on the bar-top. The thick and gritty smell of beer and green olives drapes itself over his rolled shirt-sleeves to dangle precariously from the dark fuzz extending over his unbuttoned collar. Whiskers cling to the shadowed regions below his square chin and force themselves up around his cheek-bones to stare unashamedly forward at the Saturday-night crowd. His voice is deep and mellow, and rolls down his tongue smooth and strong like the whiskey he pours. Large angular fingers crash glasses down on the bar’s wooden sheen with confidence and finality as he twirls his bottles from the wall to pour and back again. They hiss like cats as he slides alcohol one after another into glasses short and tall, single shot or double, martini or on the rocks. His black eyes shine and sing, darting from face to face with a smile for the lady and a “Hey-ya,” for the man. He’s the founder of this community, somewhere between the drunken lights and fuzzy laughter. He’s the keeper of the outcast and the stronghold of the forlorn. He calls them all by name as he tips them each a drink, and they gather here to drink his health: President of the broken.

My (Imaginary) Big Sister

Curls erupt forward gracefully to greet the proud angles of her cheeks. A rusty

glow lingers somewhere beneath the soft skin around her laughing mouth, and faintly skims over her carefully curved nose. Two brown jewels sing beneath her brow, poised and inviting, meek and courageous. Hilarity travels with her step and clothes her in a garment of joy. All that is delicious in life, the spice and the sweetness, falls down from the heavy-laden branches of the forest in her heart, and even her tears glow with mirth.

Sometimes I watch her from the corner of my window when the rain falls down

in silver almonds from the heaving, arrogant sky. She sits beneath the sky’s falling waves and sips at a steaming mug. Her hair’s tied up in a red cotton sock, and I wish she would let it all fall down like the rain. And she wields her tired bit of pen like a knight’s long sword as she scribbles in that old browned notebook. I wonder at what she writes, because her face falls so far from me when she goes to write in that faroff place. It’s another world that calls her away from me, and I hate it because I miss her when she’s there.

But then I hear my mother’s soft, familiar voice. “Katherine, come in out of the rain. I need you to set the table!” My sister’s soft disapproval at being summoned for such menial labor when transcribing her worlds into this one consumes all of my hearing, and I wonder at how my mother can hold so firm. I hate to disappoint the laughter that hangs on her curls, even when it’s all knotted in a silly red sock.

Riding the "Mia Bella"

I love it when the water creases over the tightened white edges of “Mia Bella.”

She’s not a large boat, so she can sing over the waves and swallow their sparkles with a jaw too pretty to grieve over such sad destruction. Sometimes when my sister and I hung over her edges just so far, we could skim our hair in the passing dark waters and feel it whip up to tug at our shoulder blades in such wonderful wetness. We cupped the froth in our laughing cold fingers and tried to mother the little silver bubbles all the way into the boat’s refuge, but they always shot up and hid from us in the grooves of our elbows and the tips of our noses. I never to this day kept a bubble all the way into “Mia Bella’s” rigid wooden belly, but one time my sister Katherine did. And she named it Gregorio after our neighbor’s ugly yellow poodle. She didn’t doubt that Gregorio was ugly, and, though she loved the bubble very much, she felt it necessary to name him Gregorio because the poor little dog had been run over by a car the week before. It was only fitting to honor the dead by giving the bubble his very own name, she explained.

A Visit from Mr. Sick

1.    Today my heart feels Sick. Often I used to wonder what that kind of Sick looks

like. That is, until one day when I saw him. He crawled out of his dusky cavern in my heart and dragged his cob-webbed rocking chair down into my stomach. And there, he propped himself up against acidic wall and spread languid folds of glossy obesity, like garments, across the crumpled bars of wood on his old cursed chair and teetered back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. My stomach rocked like a sailor at sea, and I was paralyzed completely (just like I am again today) by my haughty, unwelcome guest.

          Like always, he gave me just enough time to disengage with familiar faces before he uncovered from somewhere between his rancid skin flabs that serpentile rope which he lassoed around my lacrimal glands. He progressed at that point to mercilessly squeeze them dry until I was drowning in my own salty tears and begging him to stop lurching my stomach so that I could breathe. Unfortunately, I find that this particular kind of Sick struggles with a severe case of selective listening, and is generally extremely non-compliant and disobedient.

          So here I find myself once again at the mercy of my rather intrusive guest. How I long for the day when he will crawl back into his hole and post a white moving sign in the loose dirt of his front-yard. Perhaps I should take up real-estate.

Thunder

An old friend knocked at my sky last night. My heart rejoiced to hear him, because he seldom visits me here in the land of eternal rain squeezed between ocean and mountain. His throaty growl speaks deeper comfort to me than the soft and nurturing patter of rain, and the shocking glare of city lights never rivals with the brightness and the glory of his lover’s face. It was Thunder that kidnapped me from my soft, dry bed and the fragrant hypnozation of early dreams. Like the eternally mischievous Tom Sawyer, he dragged me to a water-logged dock nervously projecting itself over the seething, turbulent waves of Lake Washington cheering on the storm. I felt for a second like a member of the Greek Pantheon as I melted in with the waves,  a single euphoric member of the mob shouting and screaming for the valiant warriors combating to their death in the fervent heavenly mêlée. The proud warriors were hidden somewhere deeper than the sombre gray clouds of the night sky. Thunder’s ardent cry rang out through the earth, like a Lover calling for his lost Beloved. And Lightning seduced him with only a glance of her brazen face before running past the horizon once more. Thunder’s voice carried me to the water’s edge, and further still . . . to the teeming sky-wars buttressing the sweetest memories of my child-hood.

          I was born and spent most of my years as a girl in Wisconsin: the great Mid-West, which still retains in my memory a raw strength and the relentless passion of wildness and adventure that not even cosmpolitan urbanizatin can annihilate or dictate or economize. That stubborn freedom excites me. I remember the thunder-storms vividly. Nothing compares to the surge of raw fidelity: so pure in rage, they ravished the earth, making love to the trees and hills in a wild collision of flashing light. Branches danced to the rhythym of Thunder’s eerie percussion, threatening to snap like wax crayons as they swept the ground in valiant arches to combat the wind’s burtal thrust. Sometimes I ache for those storms again.

And with the storms always came the rain. I could smell it before it arrived, and the gray clouds hung low in the sky like angry war colonels threatening to sound the call and unleash the havoc of chaos in the skies . . . uncontrollable and firece, leaving lookers-on beneath always at the mercy of the tumultuous heaenly waves. The rain healed my heart, and sometimes refused to fall fast enough, so I wanted to reach up and squeeze the clouds with my hands like dirty dish sponges and wrestle them dry, forcing them to grant the healing I needed.  Other times rain screamed out of the sky, lunging and barging in rushing torrents with newness and gladness and joy. Sometimes it fell softly and slowly from heavy clouds laden with things long waited for. Maybe this is most beautiful, because long-suffering is hard. Patience may be a virtue, but it’s one I’d prefer never to have to learn.

          Wisconsin: more than just the thunder-storms claim my affection. I remember the cows clad in sunshine and corn-fields, chewing their cud with tepid jaws, rolling their soft, liquid brown eyes, calves hanging from their over-full udders as their tails monotonously waltzed with the flies on the black and white checkered ball-room of their broad behinds. The corn beamed green with golden sprouts, aisles continuing for eternity. I remember sitting in the back-seat of the car, my wide eyes reflecting the rich blue sky, dizzily following the straight lines of corn down flat plains to the distant horizon until my head was spinning and my tummy hurt. I am eclipsed by the 4 foot, stringy-haired girl awkwardly sporting a wealth of my treasured memories: the smell of manure and hay-bails steaming with rain in the afternoon sun, the salty water of Lake Michigan, and buck-eye chestnut trees with the grey, wrinkled trunks of elephant legs, the city of Milwaukee, haughtily brandishing her German heritage by saturating the city in the pervasive, acrid, grainy aroma of beer. The Miller Brewing Company: our pride and joy.